Michael Witmore

Interview with Michael Witmore
Interview Date: March 12, 2024
Interviewer: Stephanie Deutsch
Transcriber: David MacKinnon
Editor: Diane Platt

photo by Elizabeth Dranitzke/Photopia

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.
Not to be reproduced without permission.

START OF INTERVIEW
DEUTSCH: I’m with Michael Witmore in his office on March 12, 2024. It’s good to see you.
WITMORE: It’s good to see you, Stephanie.
DEUTSCH: Of course, I want to hear about the Folger and all the exciting things that have happened and are happening here. And I of course want to talk about Shakespeare because…
WITMORE: Who wouldn’t.
DEUTSCH: …who wouldn’t. But before that I want to hear about you and where you grew up and how you turned into the person you are.
WITMORE: Wow.
DEUTSCH: Just that.
WITMORE: Put me right on the spot. I was born in the Bay area. I moved to the suburbs of Boston when I was five. I grew up in Acton, Massachusetts. I went to Acton Boxborough Regional Public High School and was exposed to Shakespeare in a class taught by Mr. Michael Murphy.
DEUTSCH: Just one second. You moved to Boston. Was it your father’s work that took you there?
WITMORE: My father worked for DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation. My mom was a speech therapist. They moved, I think, in ’72. I was born in 1967. I consider myself a New Englander in outlook and temperament. But I do have some of the California enthusiasm.
DEUTSCH: Perfect combination.
WITMORE: And excitability.
DEUTSCH: Were there siblings in your house?
WITMORE: I have a younger brother Chris who’s two years younger than I. He lives in Melbourne, Australia,
DEUTSCH: That’s a nice place.
WITMORE: Beautiful, just far away. His two daughters Hayley and Audrey, both musicians, are in the United States now. One of them is living in Capitol Hill, my niece Audrey.
DEUTSCH: Oh, so who does she work for?
WITMORE: Washington Performing Arts.
DEUTSCH: How neat.
WITMORE: It’s been great having one of the Australian Witmores here. She loves the Folger. She really loves this neighborhood. For a while, she was living in the Deer House [712 East Capitol Street NE].
DEUTSCH: I know that house very well.
WITMORE: Ron and Stephanie Langkamp’s. They were so nice to her. She just took to it. It’s been great to have family nearby in this place where I’ve spent so much time.
DEUTSCH: Let’s go back to Boxborough High.
WITMORE: Acton-Boxborough Regional Public High School.
DEUTSCH: You got introduced to Shakespeare?
WITMORE: I was an average student. In my teenage years, I just wanted to be a drummer and play in a heavy metal band.
DEUTSCH: You and every other boy in America.
WITMORE: Right. I was a pretty dedicated drummer. Still am. [Deutsch laughs.] But I did get motivated to start paying attention to school in my junior year. I took two classes that inspired me. The first was advanced biology. I loved biological systems. I loved the dissections and labs. I thought I would go try to be a doctor based on having that experience. Someone decided to put me in honors English. That was about two grades up from where I was. Maybe they thought I had an active inner life and needed to read things.
DEUTSCH: They didn’t know you were really thinking about the drums.
WITMORE: I may not have been obvious, but I took that class and I read Homer’s Odyssey. I read Shakespeare’s Othello. And the book of Job. I remember that.
DEUTSCH: Sounds like a very good class.
WITMORE: It was a great class with Michael Murphy. That was it. When I really got into Othello, and I thought, “This is an interesting story. This is the story about what you do when you meet the person who can tell you the lies that are hardest for you to resist.” I thought it was a fascinating psychological portrait. I was a teenager, so you’re full of self-doubt. I just identified with Othello. I thought…
DEUTSCH: What did you say, the lies that you don’t want to resist?
WITMORE: The lies you can’t resist. Someone is just perfectly positioned to tell you the wrong thing. I was a truth seeker. I still am. That put a nice problem on the table for me. I thought a lot about that. I also…
DEUTSCH: What was the nice problem? Truth…
WITMORE: How do you know that you know? That’s the beginning problem of epistemology.
DEUTSCH: Although not everyone encounters it in high school.
WITMORE: Right, yeah. It was amazing…It was amazing, great.
DEUTSCH: Sometimes it takes a lot longer to…
WITMORE: That’s why he was a great teacher. He wasn’t afraid to put high-voltage questions in front of young people. I really appreciated that. I was kind of bored before I encountered that.
DEUTSCH: That’s cool.
WITMORE: It was also a turning point for me. I had been raised Evangelical-Pentecostal. We read a lot of Bible after dinner. I had read a lot of the King James Bible. So, when I encountered Shakespeare, it was kind of an interesting feeling because it’s pretty much the same language.
DEUTSCH: You were used to the language.
WITMORE: That translation is within a generation or two of Shakespeare, so that’s really there. But it wasn’t about the Bible stories. It wasn’t sacred history. It was stories. So, I felt like a door had been thrown open for me. Even at age 18, I think, I caught the bug. The plays really started to make me think.
DEUTSCH: In a way that all those years of Bible hadn’t. I mean, it was a different sensibility.
WITMORE: I think it was actually very similar because I’m also really interested in moral questions. I’m in a leadership position, so what’s the right thing to do? Shakespeare’s plays are about that too.
DEUTSCH: They’re all about that.
WITMORE: But they’re less prescriptive. They’re more like experiments with sacred history. What happened to Job, happened to Job. Whether you think he’s a mythical example or not, you’re not going to change it. But you entertain it as fact. With Othello or Hamlet or Twelfth Night…
DEUTSCH: …King Lear…
WITMORE: …or Lear, someone actually came up with that. Shakespeare had sources that he used, but the particular plights of these characters, they were designed to make you think about something. I think of Shakespeare as a great artist in designing plights. What do you do when, dot, dot, dot, you’re in love, and you got to go out on this balcony? What do you do when you’re cornered, and you have to stand up and give a speech to motivate people, like Henry the Fifth? What do you do when you are in a riot, which happens in the Henry VI plays—a populist riot? I like the fact that Shakespeare gives you concrete situations in which to ask, “What would I do? What should you do?”
DEUTSCH: Okay, so you’re an 18-year-old asking yourself these questions. What happens then?
WITMORE: I’m starting. Yeah. My father did not go to college as a young person. My mother went to Central Michigan [University] and became a speech therapist. My parents were aspirational. They believed in education. They believed in faith. They wanted me to go to college, and I was lucky enough to be able to do that. But it was my high school guidance counselor who said, “I think you can get into a pretty good college.” I was late to the game in getting good grades. So, she said, “You might as well try to get into a good liberal arts college. Just apply to one and do it early.”
DEUTSCH: She suggested one to you?
WITMORE: Yeah. She said, “You should apply to Vassar because you’ll get in, maybe, if you’re lucky.”
DEUTSCH: They had just fairly recently started accepting [men] …
WITMORE: Sixty-nine is when they[accepted men] and I applied in ’85. There had been men there, but the ratio was, I think, about 56 to 44, which was at the time the national gender average in college. I applied early. I got in. And I thought I was going to do pre-med. I took freshman English, and I just thought, “Wow.” I read William Blake. I read Virginia Woolfe. I read more Shakespeare. I read William Carlos Williams. I read Zora Neale Hurston…
DEUTSCH: …Their Eyes Were Watching God?
WITMORE: …Beautiful book. I’m trying to remember when I first read Beloved. I think that was also in college. I got a good liberal arts education. I took classes in Greek archeology that I really liked. I took classes in geology that I really liked. But it was the literature classes that really just—I just was one of those people who if I got on to something and thought, “Oh, this is interesting,” I would just keep going. I wrote my senior thesis on Othello and epistemology. Questions of, how do you deal with, quote, un-quote, empirical proof like the handkerchief?
DEUTSCH: My son played Cassio when Capitol Hill Day School did Othello here [laughs]. The minute you said the handkerchief I was like, transported.
WITMORE: That’s a great example of getting something really wrong, but thinking you have the facts. In fact, my thesis advisor, Susan McCloskey, about two years after I graduated from Vassar—I graduated and I had moved to DC—she moved to DC. She left the tenure line and became a consultant. Just two weeks ago, I brought her into the galleries for a tour, and we met the artist Fred Wilson who’s done a lot of great work about Othello, and it just felt like a full circle moment. I was just so—this person is the person—part of the reason I am here, this person.
DEUTSCH: I’m sure it was a great moment for her.
WITMORE: She loved seeing all this.
DEUTSCH: So, you moved to DC.
WITMORE: Stephanie, you might be the first person to ask me to tell my life story.
DEUTSCH: Really?
WITMORE: Yeah.
DEUTSCH: Oh my gosh. [Laughs]
WITMORE: Do you have to be a little older to do that? It’s fun. It’s good.
DEUTSCH: You moved to DC. Why did you move to DC?
WITMORE: I was in a band.
DEUTSCH: Uh, oh. The band again.
WITMORE: I was in a band called The Chimes. The bass player had moved here to DC.
DEUTSCH: DC isn’t exactly what you think of as a rock’em, sock’em band town.
WITMORE: It had an okay band scene. Fugazi was playing. There was Go Go happening here. It was a good musical town.
DEUTSCH: Jonathan, what was… the St. Albans Boys? My son was… they were all friends of his, and he did end up in a band, just not that band… Hamilton Leithauser. Yeah, they all… I met Hamilton when he was five [laughs].
WITMORE: Hamilton is so, so talented. Meshell Ndegeocello is from here. Duke Ellington spent a lot of time here. I think it’s a great musical town. I didn’t know that at the time. My friend Bob, the bass player from Oberlin, Ohio, had a house on Ninth and G [Streets] SE. He rented it with a couple other people, and he said I could crash on his sofa, which I did. I brought my drums.
DEUTSCH: This is classic!
WITMORE: I tried to get a job. By day I had a…
DEUTSCH: What year are we now?
WITMORE: We’re in ’89.  I had a housemate at Vassar whose dad worked at the Library of Congress— Richard Bickel, in the manuscript division. I said to Rick, “I’m moving to DC, and I’m interested in research in libraries. Could you help me get an internship?” He said, “You should talk to the Congressional Research Service.” I got this very weird assignment reporting to Congressman George Brown from Riverside, California.
DEUTSCH: Oh yeah. He lived in my mother’s basement. Such a small world.
WITMORE: Such a small world. He was on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. I was interested in science policy. Part of my thesis was about empirical sciences and how the West became interested in what it thought was objectivity around the 17th Century. That was as much as I had, but I said, “I think research and science might be interesting.” So, I was an intern for George Brown, and I wrote a comparative report on science policymaking in Japan, France, U.K., and Germany. They just kind of unleashed me, and I requested a lot of books.
DEUTSCH: In the U.S., Japan, and all those places?
WITMORE: The U.S. was implied. I think the Congressman wanted… or a member of his staff wanted some comparison.
DEUTSCH: U.S., Japan, and where else?
WITMORE: France, UK. That was when Japan was manufacturing semiconductors, and U.S. science was interested in state-sponsored science. Meanwhile, I did have to make money, so because I had a professor with a Shakespeare connection, she said, “Go to the Folger Shakespeare Library.” This was Miranda Haddad. And I came here, and I got a job as a telemarketer for Folger theater. At night I worked in 301 [East Capitol Street], across from Michael Kahn’s office [Michael Kahn was the artistic director of The Folger Theatre Group, now the Shakespeare Theatre Company]. We had these boxes with little index cards, and I would take out the card, and I would call people and try to sell them a season. Then I would ask them for a gift too.
DEUTSCH: For a gift? Oh yeah. And would you also give us $500?
WITMORE: Yeah. I would ask for $5,000, and I got it from one guy, which was a complete surprise. There was an advantage to that. They gave us standing room tickets, as many as we wanted, to see the plays. Oh gosh, I saw Twelfth Night, I think five times with Kelly McGillis.
DEUTSCH: Oh, I saw that.
WITMORE: It was a great production. I had read a lot of Shakespeare, but I hadn’t seen a lot of Shakespeare, so just a lot of sparks began to fly for me because Shakespeare writes these great situations for people. But it’s also very good for actors because they can do it live. That really opened my eyes. I was getting interested in that. A guy named Norman Metzger, who lives on Capitol Hill…
DEUTSCH: …Of course I know…
WITMORE: Norm had somehow heard that I’d written this report for George Brown, and he said, “Why don’t you send me a copy.” I sent him a copy. He was executive director of the NRC, the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences. Norm said, “Hey, this is pretty good. Why don’t you work with me writing up reports for meetings we have with our scientists?” I did eventually have to get a place to live, and I moved to California Street in Kalorama. I was over there in a basement apartment writing these reports for Norm Metzger. It was exciting. I would go meet him in his office in the Constitution Avenue building. I was pretty wowed by that. Then he said, “Okay, you’re done with my project. You should get a full-time job at the NRC.” So, I found a position for the National Academies of Engineering on the Manufacturing Studies Board. I essentially wrote up the report on the cost factors that influence manufacturing companies to leave the United States and go abroad.
DEUTSCH: Oh, that’s pretty important stuff…
WITMORE: …Which is a pretty important topic. The finding of the study was that it wasn’t cost. It was access to labor, infrastructure, tax breaks. Well, tax is part of the cost. For the semiconductor people, which was a big part of the study—oh, machine tools. For automobiles, you want to be close to machine tool makers, and machine tools left the United States.  
DEUTSCH: I don’t even know what machine tools are.
WITMORE: These are the tools that make parts. They wanted access to talent and parts producers. For the semiconductor folks, it wasn’t at all about cost. It was it was about efficiency, skilled labor market, and access to infrastructure. I learned about policy. I learned more about economics. But, at a certain point I thought, “I’m in these rooms with these very, very smart people.” With Norm, there were physicists that we were spending time with. There was a Nobel Prize winning physicist in the room. I couldn’t believe that. That was amazing. With the Manufacturing Studies Board, there were actually executives from the sector where my dad worked. There was the vice president for Digital Equipment Corporation who was incredibly difficult and confrontational. [Deutsch laughs]. I remember calling my dad and saying, “You know this guy, right?” He says, “I work with him all the time.” I said, “How do you do it?” [Laughs]. He said, “I’m very patient, but in industry the dynamics are more confrontational, and you haven’t encountered that yet. People who are bullies can get their way, and you have to deal with that.” I didn’t stick around long.
DEUTSCH: It’s just kind of the culture.
WITMORE: Yeah…It’s not academic. It’s different style. But I hadn’t been exposed to it. I’d had jobs before, but I hadn’t seen this type of conflict and elbow throwing, But I learned something from it. I saw that people with initiative—whether they are right or wrong—they manage to get the microphone, and sometimes they get their way. It’s a truth. The band was only going okay.
DEUTSCH: What was the band called again?
WITMORE: The Chimes.
DEUTSCH: The Chimes. I love that name. It sounds so musical.
WITMORE: We liked REM and what was at that time called jangle pop [a subgenre of pop rock or college rock—very guitar based—that emphasized jangly guitars].
DEUTSCH: Jangle pop. I haven’t heard that term before.
WITMORE: It’s REM…a good example. But I started teaching drums for income.
DEUTSCH: Where?
WITMORE: Freelance. I also worked at a GIS [Geographical Information System] non-profit on Second Street, about a block away from my current apartment. The other guy at the front desk, his name was Jessie Winch. He was in a band called Celtic Thunder. which is a really big Irish band. He had a son named Yancy who loved Go Go. I had learned as a drummer how to play Go-go beats. I learned it at Vassar. So, I did a trade. I taught Yancy how to play Go-Go beats, and then Jessie taught me how to play the frame drum, the bodhrán.
DEUTSCH: Bodhrán.
WITMORE: A frame drum, you hold it with your hand, and you play with a two-sided stick. Not easy. I liked teaching drums. Music was still a really big part of my life. But I realized that it’s fun to be in rooms with really smart people and write up what they’re saying. But I wanted to have something to say. Meanwhile, I had developed an interest in something called…I don’t know how this is going to be useful to you Stephanie?
DEUTSCH: It’s interesting to me whether I use it or not.
WITMORE: I was very interested in a field in the humanities called semiotics. The study of signs. How signs work. Those could be pheromones. Those could be charts and diagrams. They could be words. I was interested in going to graduate school to study semiotics, and God knows how I got into this. I was really interested in the geologist Lyell who discovered that the sequence of deposits demonstrated that the earth was much, much older than we thought it was. He did it by decoding…
DEUTSCH:…Like at the Grand Canyon where [they have the] you can walk [along; you walk] a certain number of steps for each level, and it takes you a mile to…yeah.
WITMORE: That’s right.
DEUTSCH: What was the geologist’s name?
WITMORE: Charles Lyell. I got interested in that because to persuade people that the earth was really old, he had to create diagrams. I thought, “Well you win or lose the argument based on how good your diagram is.” I wanted to study in the history of science how people used these illustrations and diagrams to win arguments about what nature is really like. There was a person at the University of San Diego named Martin Rudwick who was the world’s greatest Lyell scholar. So, I wrote to him, and I said, “Could I come to San Diego and study history of geology with you?” I essentially got a note back saying, “Yes, but you’re going to have become a historian. None of this language semiotics stuff. That seems a little abstract.”
DEUTSCH: Okay. We need facts.
WITMORE: We need facts. You need to go into the archive and figure out who thought what, when. I was interested in something more abstract. So, I got into that program, I just didn’t go. [I went to the University of Chicago.] I got into the University of Chicago also for the history of science. And when I went for a visit…
DEUTSCH: …This is a PhD program in the history of science?
WITMORE: … Both of them were. I wanted to do history of science. They [University of Chicago]  had a little seminar on French philosophy. It was kind of an extra-curricular thing.
DEUTSCH: Only at the University of Chicago would a student go to an extra-curricular thing about French philosophy.
WITMORE: Right, French philosophy—or recent French philosophy. But, that was an important topic because in the mid to late 20th Century in France, philosophers became very aware of the way in which language shapes your view of reality including in areas like science. Our grip on the real world is mediated through the metaphors and analogies that we use to frame what we’re describing. That’s a very big idea, and I think it is right. I had encountered it at Vassar.
When I went to this little seminar, the guy who was leading it [who] was supposed to be the person I was going to go study with at Chicago. First, they didn’t give me any money. So, I didn’t really want to go, but second, when he got this group together, he said, “Well, we’re going just skim some of these French philosophers so that you can be au courant.” But I could tell they weren’t that interested in it, and I was. I asked them a bunch of questions. If I’d gone there, I wanted to study the emergence of the museum and museum collections.
DEUTSCH: As sort of a concept?
WITMORE: Yup. And I was particularly interested in the fact that when you displayed something called fossils in the 17th Century, you could put a Roman coin in there. You could put a bone in there. You could put a piece of pottery. They didn’t discriminate. The word fossil just meant something that’s been dug up.
DEUTSCH: Something old.
WITMORE: Yeah. Many people in these curiosity cabinets and wonder cabinets would collect stones that had things that looked like letters in the alphabet on them—made by chance. That for me was interesting. It showed me that the way we divide the world up now wasn’t the way people always did. Now we think things that happen in nature are very different than why you would make a coin with the image of Julius Caesar’s head on it. Two totally different processes. You shouldn’t put those items in the same case. They listened to me talk about that, and then they said, “Okay, we’ll offer you some money.” In the meantime, I had found this other program called the Department of Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley. This place was the department of loose supervision.
DEUTSCH: At UC Berkeley.
WITMORE: Oh my gosh. It was amazing. It was so exciting. They started with classical rhetoric and oratory, but went right up through French philosophy and the ways in which language really shapes how we view the world and our relationship to the world. I called a guy who was in the program, and I said, “What are you allowed to do there?” He said, “Well, I’m writing my dissertation on the origins of DNA and the idea that DNA was a code, [and] who was the first person who decided it was a code and that it was like language.” I just thought, “That’s it. I’m going there.” So, I got in.
DEUTSCH: This is Berkeley.
WITMORE: Berkeley. I went to Berkely in the rhetoric department. I got as much French philosophy as I could ever want. German philosophy, classical philosophy. I met a lot of really important people there for me. I met Stephen Greenblatt, and I took a seminar with him on memory. We read Hamlet together. I loved it. I just loved it. I thought he was amazing. I wasn’t in the English program, so I was kind of an interloper, but he agreed to chair my dissertation.
DEUTSCH: Should I know the name Stephen Greenblatt?
WITMORE: Yeah. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Swerve. He teaches at Harvard now.
DEUTSCH: So, he’s going to [chair] your dissertation.
WITMORE: He agreed. Then the other three people were historians of science and intellectual historians. I just had this dream combination. There was a scholar named Lorraine Daston who was the head of the Max Planck Institute [for the History of Science] in Berlin for the history of science. I went to Berlin for a couple of months to work on my dissertation. That was incredibly exciting.
There was a scholar  named Hayden White who had invented the field of meta history, the study of how all historians use narrative frames from different genres to tell their stories. I think to us, now, it feels like common sense. In the late 60s, that did not seem like common sense. And an intellectual historian named Barbara Shapiro who did science and the law in the 17th Century. At some point I read Francis Bacon. I got to the sentence in the Novum Organum where he says, “An experiment is an accident that happens on purpose.” I knew immediately that I wanted to write my dissertation on accidental events.
DEUTSCH: Accidental events.
WITMORE: Yep. Was it even possible to have an accident in the 17th Century when God was understood to control every detail? What could you learn by accident that you couldn’t learn by setting out to learn something? Because Bacon essentially said, “We’re so stupid, and we’re so beholden to ancient philosophers like Aristotle that the only way we ever learn something new about nature is by accident. If that’s true, then you should go out in the world and do more experiments.” So, I wrote my first book and dissertation on accident narratives.
DEUTSCH: Was that the name of the book?
WITMORE: It’s called Culture of Accidents, Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England.
DEUTSCH: Wasn’t the invention of penicillin one of those?
WITMORE: Yeah. So was gun powder. An accident shows you that you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s one of the only ways you can figure that out.
DEUTSCH: And also, sometimes shows you that you can do things you thought you couldn’t do.
WITMORE: Exactly right. It acquaints you with what’s unexpected. The discovery I made while I was writing this is the only way to explain an accident is to tell a story about it. These stories have a very interesting property that can’t be compressed. Any accident that happens—well, I was on my way to work sipping my coffee, meanwhile someone else was driving their car and on the cell phone and not paying attention. Eventually we blah, blah, blah—there’s no way to simplify that story. If there’s a causal explanation for something that happens, you can shorten it. So, I was in a rhetoric program. I was interested in language. I discovered this thing about stories, and I just thought, “I’m happy.” So, I wrote my dissertation. I won a prize. The Perkins Prize for Narratology.
DEUTSCH: Narratology!
WITMORE: The study of narrative.
DEUTSCH: Oh, it’s an awful word though.
WITMORE: I know. It’s terrible.
DEUTSCH: What year are we now when you did your dissertation?
WITMORE: Now we’re in ’97.
DEUTSCH: Okay. Your dissertation is in narratology?
WITMORE: Yup. It was.
DEUTSCH: You invented a field.
WITMORE: It existed. I’m very comfortable saying I work in narratology. That’ s a very precise description. I couldn’t get a job with that. So, I put a Shakespeare chapter in my dissertation. I wrote about the pirate rescue in Hamlet when Hamlet is accidentally returned to Denmark because the pirates come and grab him. There are actually many accidents in Shakespeare. Desdemona drops the handkerchief by accident. It’s a trope. I maybe hoped that if I included a chapter on Shakespeare, I could apply for jobs in English departments, because there really weren’t departments of narratology or rhetoric.
DEUTSCH: So, you were thinking about an academic career.
WITMORE: Absolutely. Oh gosh, yes. I was writing a dissertation with the right person. Stephen Greenblatt was and is the most significant Shakespeare critic of the late 20th Century and remains a good friend.
DEUTSCH: So, what happened?
WITMORE: I was offered a post-doc. I got a Mellon post-doc at UCLA [University of California Los Angeles] for a program called Science and the Humanities that brought together historians of science, working scientists, literature people, and philosophers. It was two years of support. It was amazing. I was very, very lucky to get this because it let me get a head start on writing my first book and starting my second book, because I was doing research at the Huntington Library.
DEUTSCH: What was your second book?
WITMORE: It’s called Pretty Creatures, and it’s about child performers in the early modern period. Actors, kids performing in pageants, and children who were possessed, because they had little shows that they would put on.
DEUTSCH: I don’t think they’re possessed. Every time my grandchildren come to my house they put on a show. They put on a play. It’s always different. Usually there’s a bad guy. [Laughs.]
WITMORE: Aristotle says, “Imitation is natural to children, and all story telling is imitation.” I had another big idea. If you want to understand how storytelling works in the Renaissance, look at how children behave and what people say about them. I did a lot of research for that on my postdoc. Because I had two books that were pretty far along, I got a job at Carnegie Mellon as an assistant professor. I started in the year 2000, in January.
DEUTSCH: In the English department?
WITMORE: In the English department. But they had a significant rhetoric component in their English department. I think they liked me because I was non-traditional. I was at Carnegie Mellon for nine years.
DEUTSCH: Wow, you finally settled down.
WITMORE: I did. I met my then wife, Kellie Robertson. We had a son. Our son Silas.
DEUTSCH: Where is Carnegie Mellon?
WITMORE: It’s in Pittsburgh.
DEUTSCH: You met Kellie there?
WITMORE: I met Kellie there. She was a professor at Pitt. Kellie who has been on the board of the foundation [Capitol Hill Community Foundation].
DEUTSCH: Who I know. And you had your son Silas.
WITMORE: We had our son Silas in 2004. Both of us made our careers. Raised a family. We both had tenure, which was huge, life-changing. Rehabbed an old Victorian house. That wouldn’t be the last. Spent a lot of time in London on sabbaticals in the British Library. I wrote another book on [laughs]—I wrote a book on Shakespeare and metaphysics that focused on three philosophers who I really like—Spinoza [Baruch de Spinosa], Henri Bergson [Henri-Louis Bergson], and Alfred North Whitehead. I like all of them because they say that everything is interconnected. Particularly the last one, Whitehead said. “The most basic unit of reality is not a thing but an event,” which he applied to theology. His philosophy was called process philosophy because it’s about events.
DEUTSCH: He said the most basic thing is not a thing.
WITMORE: Not things. It’s events. If you are asking yourself what is the most real thing in the universe, this stuff is only apparent. What’s underneath it is events. This was before quantum physics happened. I think that’s probably right. It struck me as probably right. So, I wrote a book on how Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate some of the principles.
DEUTSCH: Of these guys.
WITMORE: Of these guys. Yeah. First Spinoza, the idea that there aren’t many things, there’s only one big thing. I used the Tempest. It’s an island. Everything’s connected for example. So, I wrote that book, and I became a full professor when I was 42 and received a job offer from the University of Wisconsin where the humanities were more respected. Carnegie Mellon was great for robotics and computer science and performing arts. I did want to be around historians, philosophers. People who thought about things and didn’t just build things. While I was at Carnegie Mellon, I actually did something important. I hung around with some statisticians and got interested in finding patterns, counting words in Shakespeare’s plays and finding patterns, and began to apply this statistical modeling to the plays. I didn’t really talk about it out loud, because I thought it would hurt my chances of getting tenure. Once I had tenure…
DEUTSCH: Did you fess up?
WITMORE: I fessed up, and I became part of an emerging field called the digital humanities. I really enjoyed that work. I learned linear algebra. I learned principal component analysis. I learned a lot about statistics and began writing articles about how computation helps us understand the ways the plays are built. When Shakespeare’s writing a comedy, he’ll prefer the words “I”, “you” and avoid the word “we,” for example. If you want to have four acts of courtship where people are kind of arguing with each other but like each other, it’s  “I said this, and you did this.”
DEUTSCH: Not “We’re going to do this together.”
WITMORE: Correct. So, a comedy is a play that avoids the word “we” until the fifth act. In a way it makes sense, but you wouldn’t think…
DEUTSCH: But you wouldn’t think of it unless you approached it that way.
WITMORE: Correct. It also involves a lot of words like no, not, never… negation. A comedy prefers the word a to the word the. Indefinite articles. Interestingly enough, if you unleash a computer program with that recipe for comedy on all of Shakespeare’s plays, the most comic act he ever wrote was in the middle of Othello. That’s because Othello is a seduction play where Iago seduces Othello. So Shakespeare used the linguistic patterns that he’d invented for comedies. But on top of that platform, he put this horrible misunderstanding. That actually explains why the play is so unnerving.
DEUTSCH: Because it’s not what you think.
WITMORE: It’s feeding you signals of comedy, and it’s doing tragedy. At the end of that project, I learned that a woman who worked at the Folger, Susan Snyder, Professor Susan Snyder, had said exactly this 30 years earlier. She said, “Othello was a tragedy built on a comic base.”
When I came back here and worked here, it was great to hear people tell stories about Susan Snyder. So Kellie and I went to Wisconsin. She was hired as a medievalist. She taught Anglo-Saxon and then late medieval literature. I taught Shakespeare and digital humanities. I managed to get to know some people at the Mellon Foundation. We received $1.4 million-plus grant to study patterns of words in books that were printed between the 1470s and roughly 1700 because they had been digitized and transcribed.
DEUTSCH: What was seen as the ultimate goal of that?
WITMORE: There were a couple. One was to be able to trace influences. The second was, I think pretty rudimentary, to find out who borrowed words from who else. People said Shakespeare made up 2,000 words, which is wrong. Once you can look at the other books, you realize he’s just quoting lots and lots of people. I think the number of words he invented is probably in the low hundreds.
And then you could register social disruption, which was something that I was interested in. The English civil war happens in the middle of that 17th Century when we have thousands and thousands of books that have been digitized. If you look at what words go next to what other words, what are you seeing in 1639 when they are killing Charles, or 1689 during the glorious revolution when William comes? It was interesting. You really could see these historical patterns showing up in the way people were using words. For me, that was kind of like geology. Oh, you see the changes. This stratum curves, and you get this other one. I really loved that. I still do a little of that work today. In fact, tonight I’m going to talk to one of my collaborators about it.
I then got a call from Gail Kern Paster. I’d had a short-term fellowship here at the Folger, and I’d lived across the street in those little houses in the alley…down across the street.  And  I just loved Capitol Hill—Would go for walks, take the dog out every day. Silas just loved it. We would go to the grocery store on the corner of Fourth and East Capitol.
DEUTSCH: Rolands?
WITMORE: Rolands, yeah, and get ice cream sandwiches. [It’s called the Corner Market. Rolands was on Pennsylvania Avenue SE just off Fourth Street]
DEUTSCH: What’s not to love.
WITMORE: It was just great. I was scheduled to do an exhibition at the Folger with an artist friend of mine Rosamond Purcell who takes pictures of very old things, like that book. That’s one of her books. Gail and I had met. I think I’d actually come into this office to talk to her about a book I was trying to write on wisdom [laughs] which is…
DEUTSCH: Just that, just wisdom?
WITMORE: Oh, it was impossible; I still have four very big notebooks over there, all of research. The question I was asking was, at what point did people start to think that you could find wisdom in books versus wisdom in experience? Seventeenth Century is the age when the printing press started printing more proverbs and collections of proverbs than ever before.
DEUTSCH: Maybe we could skip the whole experience thing and just read about it [laughs].
WITMORE: Exactly. That’s what I was angling for.
DEUTSCH: Was Gail calling to recruit you?
WITMORE: She was calling to recruit me. She said, “Mike you should apply for this job.”
DEUTSCH: As Director of the Folger.
WITMORE: As Director of the Folger. I said, “Gail”—So, [at the time, so] it’s 2011 [when] she called me. I was born in ’67, so I was 44—[I] My thought was, “Oops this is a victory lap for a senior person. This is not for me.” Sadly, her husband was ill. She was leaving the post early, and she said, “That’s as may be, but I think you would be good at it.” I said, “Well I’ve never run anything before except a large grant.” She said, “The staff are very strong. But you seem to think the humanities could appeal to more than scholars, that it could be exciting for many more people, and you go out there and talk about it. You’re doing an exhibition.”
DEUTSCH: How did she know you? Because of your time here?
WITMORE: I came into her office while I was here on a short-term fellowship, and I said, “Hi, I’m Mike Witmore, I’d love to tell you what I’m up to.” She was very generous and very gracious. She sat in this chair right here, and I sat right there, and I told her what I was up to. I remember being on the third floor of our house in Wisconsin sitting down to write this letter. “Dear Folger board of governors. I write to apply for the post of director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.” And about  halfway into that letter, I realized, this is a really good job, and I want it.
DEUTSCH: I’m not just going through the motions.…
WITMORE: I want this job because Shakespeare is one of the most widely read, performed artists on the planet. The Folger is best in kind in so many areas. Certainly, starting with its collection. It’s a public institution with performance and exhibitions, and it’s next to the heart of democracy in a great city like DC. I just thought if you can’t do it there, it can’t be done.
DEUTSCH: In a way, in a weird way it kind of brought together everything that you’d been…it was perfect.
WITMORE: It was perfect. I wrote that letter, and I thought, “Good luck, kiddo.” I got a letter from the chair of the board saying…
DEUTSCH: Who was that?
WITMORE: Paul Ruxin, now deceased, but Paul was a very witty book collector and great lawyer. He said, “You will report to Washington on this Friday at nine am. You may make ten minutes of remarks, non-duplicative of what was in your letter, and we will ask you questions.”
DEUTSCH: Oh my God. No pressure.
WITMORE: It felt like a summons.
DEUTSCH: I like that non-duplicative thing.
WITMORE: Non-duplicative.
DEUTSCH: That’s such, er, speaking of language, that’s icky, but anyway, it gets the point across.
WITMORE: That’s the way they made their point. I went and bought a suit. My first suit.
DEUTSCH: Literally your first suit?
WITMORE: Well, maybe I had an Easter suit from when I was 13 or 14.
DEUTSCH: Maybe you had a suit you got married in.
WITMORE: Tux. Rented tux.
DEUTSCH: Oh, rented tux. Okay, so you bought your first suit. I’m buying it! I’m buying the first suit.
WITMORE: I went and bought a suit, and I walked down this hallway, walked into the Founders Room— oh no, it was the board room downstairs—Old board room. There were 8 people around a very long table. I’d never been in a boardroom. They were all looking at me. They were nice. They were very personable.
DEUTSCH: Friendly.
WITMORE: Yes. Cullen Murphy was there, former chair of the Amherst board, editor-at-large for Vanity Fair. Maxine Isaacs was there; Lou Cohen [Louis R. Cohen] who became the Folger board chair. I had to say something.
DEUTSCH: [Laughs]. Obviously, whatever you said made some kind of sense.
WITMORE: I said, “This is a great institution. There are only two things, however, that stand in your way. The first is that digital media is going to change the way people use collections like this. And the second is that it’s not obvious why the humanities matter.”
DEUTSCH: So, the first was a very technical thing. Digital media is going to change the way people use these collections because they can access it…
WITMORE:…Remotely
DEUTSCH: …Yep
WITMORE: …Or they will use it for different things. They will look for statistical patterns, or as we’ve showed when I was director, you can think of a book as a DNA storage mechanism, and you can retrieve DNA from books, old DNA.
DEUTSCH: And the second thing was…
WITMORE: The second thing is it’s not obvious why the humanities matter in the same way that it was even 20 years ago. I said, “The first issue is the technical one. The second one is existential. If you cannot demonstrate your value beyond the scholars who use the collection, you will slowly become irrelevant, and the collection will be culturally dead even if it physically survives.” I may not have said something that dramatic but that’s what I meant.
They thought that was interesting, and they asked me a lot of questions. Then they wanted to talk to me. I got interviewed by James Shapiro, the famous Shakespeare scholar. He was on the board, and his job was to figure out if I knew what I was talking about. I had an hour… “What do you think about this?”
DEUTSCH: It was like things from Shakespeare? I mean, what do you think about the handkerchief?
WITMORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The handkerchief, or there are multiple sources for King Lear. The editorial tradition is complex. What do you think about the sources? A lot of different kinds of questions. At the end of this hour he said, “Yes, I think you know your Shakespeare.” So, I got the job.
I came here. I think they thought, “He’s pretty young. He’s a digital guy…He’s a digital person. He’ll move us forward a ways.” It turned out the digital things [helped]…I still had a 1.4 million dollar Mellon Grant at Wisconsin which I actually had to leave as PI [principal investigator] when I came here. We put the Folger Shakespeare online for free and started inviting people who studied digital texts to do work here at the Folger. That kind of happened pretty fast.
When I got here though, I realized the building is the inspiration for the entire mission. [It’s]The mission is built into this building, and the building had significant problems.
DEUTSCH: Had that been pointed out to you in the interview process, or was that something that you realized when you came here?
WITMORE: I had seen the building more than ten years before when I was a telemarketer, and I knew it had a series of great rooms…great historic rooms. I hadn’t spent much time in the building. We’d had discoloration of the marble from some flashing that was on the roof. We didn’t have signage that made it obvious you could get in. It was physically inaccessible. There was a parking lot on the side where there used to be a turn around and a fountain. I felt like the building was forbidding and inaccessible. Often, we couldn’t show anyone anything because the collection, which is vast…it’s underground behind the building.
Thousands and thousands of linear feet of rare books and manuscripts couldn’t be shown in the great hall, which was designed as a social space and a display space, because the full south daylight of those window openings would fade all the ink. Your choice is to either put linoleum on the windows to block out all the light, which is what there was when I got here, or to open those windows and put the books somewhere else.
When those doors were closed to change over exhibitions, there was nothing someone could see if they came to the Folger. The first folio was in there. So, people would bounce off our institute. First, they would think it was a bank, or that it was federal, or that it was closed.
DEUTSCH: This is so funny that you were hired for all these incredibly wonky sorts of intellectual reasons and now you’re dealing with a building. You’re dealing with something incredibly practical.
WITMORE: I became a convert to practical immediately. We did a strategic plan. The strategic plan focused on making the collection and the building accessible. We did a master plan, which confirmed the intuitions that there needed to be capital investment in systems and other things, but we needed a front door, and we needed a place to really welcome the public. Kieran Timberlake were hired to do that plan and then to do the project, but they said, “Tackle your public platform first because if you can open those doors and become more visible, you’re claim on philanthropy and the beauty of your mission and the people you touch, those are going to convince so many people.”
They created this project plan. which was to use the landscape. The garden designer Hallie Boyce of OLIN responded to a comment from our architect Steve Kieran who said, “Well, the Folger—the Paul Cret building—is really a series of great rooms. You’ve got the theater, the Great Hall, and the reading room.” And she said, “I think we should start with some great rooms that are garden rooms because we garden designers think in terms of rooms.” At that moment Steve said, “Yes, and then we’re going to pass the landscape right through the building.” In ten seconds, the big idea happened. They worked together to design these facing public gardens that did what I desperately hoped we could do, which was to tell people from the corner, “This place is for you, come on in.”
DEUTSCH: Right. This is not a forbidding, serious…
WITMORE: Let them see and use nature to say, “Put down your calendars…,” as the Rita Dove poem starts out. Pocket your calendars, and let’s go down the garden path and welcome you to the once-upon-a-time place of Shakespeare in history as you leave the federal space behind. So, that was the intention—to create an immediate visible sense of belonging.
DEUTSCH: What did you say that once upon a time space of…
WITMORE: The once upon a time space of great stories and of history. But you have to get them down the garden path, you need to make people feel comfortable. Shakespeare was perhaps the great poet of nature. He refers to the natural world all the time. He grew up in Warwickshire. We know from statistics that there are by far more nature images in Shakespeare than in any other Renaissance playwright. [He was] very significantly interested in how nature works.
So, we designed the pavilion, we permitted the project— which took a long time—Commission of Fine Arts, Historic preservation, Capitol Hill Restoration [Society], Public Spaces [DC Department of Transportation], two adjacent ANCs [area neighborhood commissions]. It was complex. But we worked very hard to let people know our aims and to let people know that we respect the existing building.
We applied for landmark designation for the interior of the Cret building. It hadn’t been landmarked yet, and got it. The exterior was, but the interior wasn’t, so we landmarked this floor essentially. Then we embarked on this modern intervention, which was to insert a new public wing under the building. We raised 51 million dollars and counting toward that project.
DEUTSCH: That must have taken a huge…I’m sure there was development staff but you’re still the front guy having to do a lot of…
WITMORE: During the pandemic.
DEUTSCH: During the pandemic. Can you have a Zoom meeting to ask someone for a million dollars? [Laughs].
WITMORE: More than that. Very, very generous people believed in the importance of opening this institution and investing in the future of poetry, theater, history, and music, steps away from our civic life over here. That’s “word central” over there where the words really, really matter. And this beautiful neighborhood and community, starting with Capitol Hill, but the District of Columbia is our home. We are here for the District.
I know people were impressed with the Folger at Oxford, Cambridge, and London. We have fans there. But what about where we are? You can’t be timid and say, “Well, only certain kinds of people are going to like Shakespeare or be interested.” Prove it! The kinds of artists, young artists who come into this building and actually want to have an argument with Shakespeare. Or rewrite parts of it. Or respectfully imitate it. It’s all there. Especially in the wake of the movement for racial justice. I think it was very interesting, specifically for the Folger, to both confront instances of exclusion and racism and colonialism in the way Shakespeare was used, and talk about that. Indian schools in the United States where indigenous people were forced to not use their language, they were taught Shakespeare.
DEUTSCH: This was so interesting in the play.
WITMORE: The records of the settling, the maps that were used to come up the Chesapeake [Bay] to DC, those maps were created before there was a United States. They were created in London. They’re downstairs. There had been racist incidents in the history of the Folger where a Howard [University] professor named Benjamin Brawley was excluded from the birthday lecture. I wrote a piece about it for the Folger magazine. Benjamin Brawley outsmarted the director Joseph Quincy Adams and managed to come to the birthday lecture. I think he single-handedly integrated Folger social occasions.
DEUTSCH: What year was that?
WITMORE: 1939. Brian can get you a copy of the article. The story is completely fascinating.
DEUTSCH: I’d love to see the article.
WITMORE: Joseph Quincy Adams who was then director was the same person who, when the Folger opened in 1932, gave a speech that said, “One of the reasons we’re here is to protect the purity of Anglo-Saxon culture in an age of immigration.” We needed to face that because that was real. There were Shakespeare quoting members of Congress who were writing these immigration acts.
DEUTSCH: Protect the purity of Anglo-Saxon culture.
WITMORE: Anglo-Saxon culture. The exact wording you can find in the…but my feeling is we need to walk straight into those conversations with help and assistance from others. And we need to link it to how we think about our audiences and our programming because there’s a great deal of energy in sight and creativity around, “How do you adapt a canonical white writer like Shakespeare for a multi-racial, democratic world?” How do you do that? But that’s really worth doing. Because Shakespeare is a doorway, because of the stories. But Shakespeare wrote beautifully about the joys of being part of a community. He wrote beautifully about the pain of being excluded. He wrote about racism. He wrote about military victories. He wrote about seduction. He wrote about faith. He did all those things.
Because he’s been around for a long time and because Americans love Shakespeare, his stories have a way of inviting us to talk about who we are now, who we want to be. It’s like a doorway. People will walk through that doorway and have conversations that they might be afraid to have in any other context as long as the conversation is supported. Also, I think people of color who had been excluded from Shakespeare in places like the Folger had something to say and get off their chests. I think people who look and sound like me had the opportunity to learn.
Then together we built something that is inclusive, powerful, elevating. This project is a magnificent expression of that aspiration, but that aspiration is what’s most important. How do we build a place that inspires, elevates, tells truths, and enables the creation of a multi-racial, civic democracy?
DEUTSCH: Yup. That is the question.
WITMORE: That’s worth doing. A place that has frankly the institutional cultural power that we have. The stability. The prestige. The location. If you are an institution, and you’re not aiming to walk the highest wire—no one is going to be impressed if you walk a low wire and have a nice safety net. We felt that although we might make some mistakes, we could unmistakably show that Shakespeare is for a lot more people partly because you can throw anything at him. I’m not saying Shakespeare is indestructible. I’m just saying if you’ve got a problem with his plays…if you have a problem with the antisemitism of Taming the Shrew, you can say it. You can go all out against the racism that’s on display in that play. Then you can have a really good conversation about, “Is it in the play…is it in the culture…is it in us?”
DEUTSCH: Where do we see it reflected?
WITMORE: Yeah. I was inspired by the resilience and the fact that we can bring our joys, aspirations, and disappointments to these plays, and to the history that got us here. The period from roughly 1500 to 1700 that is covered by the Folger collection is really a powerful shaping force for how we think and feel today whether it’s the Protestant Reformation, birth of science, colonialism, stock markets, mercantilism.
DEUTSCH: It’s all there.
WITMORE: The whole modern media revolution in the form of the book. Close to the whole package of the modern world happens in this period. The amazing thing is that Shakespeare has a front row seat to that. You’ve got a fantastically gifted lyric poet, storyteller in an urban environment that is international practicing an artform that is brand new, professional public theater, telling stories about history, and he’s an incredible story teller. Incredible. That’s quite a package.
I’m at the end of my tenure now. My life has changed a lot in the last five years, and I’ve learned a lot in the last five years. Probably the pandemic accelerated how I thought about the need to open up, professionally and personally, myself and also our institution. I will step down at the end of June, and I will have finished the work that I came here to do.
DEUTSCH: What’s next?
WITMORE: I am going to a mountain top, and I will meditate. [Deutsch laughs]
DEUTSCH: Really?
WITMORE: Yes. I’m moving to Colorado. I have loved ones in Colorado. Almost every good idea I’ve ever had, I’ve had in Colorado. My three books.
DEUTSCH: Really?
WITMORE: Yeah. Something about the altitude. I didn’t expect to have the opportunity to be the director of the Folger. There was a moment when I thought, “I can see around a corner that maybe the organization can’t, and I could add something.” I’ve worked a lot in the last 13 years, and I’m actually looking forward to a break.
DEUTSCH: I can imagine. The intensity of what you have been doing is huge.
WITMORE: It’s intense. It’s a consuming job, and it’s a wonderful job. I just know in my heart that if I pause and look to the horizon, it will become clear if and where there’s another place that I can contribute. I won’t say yes to anything unless I feel that I really can see around a corner and be helpful.
DEUTSCH: So, you literally won’t be employed?
WITMORE: That is correct. I will be a consultant for the foreseeable future.
DEUTSCH: There’s probably a lot of that out there.
WITMORE: There are many institutions that are thinking about how to open up historic, cultural spaces.
DEUTSCH: Yes, I can imagine.
WITMORE: What the financial, physical, cultural, and staff consequences are when you decide that you need to take action. If I had myself today to talk to ten years ago, it would have been helpful. So, I’m starting there.
DEUTSCH: Fascinating. Anything else you want me to know?
WITMORE: I just told you the whole story to the current moment.
DEUTSCH: I love it. Do you still play in a band? Do you still drum?
WITMORE: Absolutely. I’m a guitar player now. I started to study the jazz guitar. I have a great teacher. I actually build vacuum tube vintage amplifiers, and I wind my own…
DEUTSCH: What did you say, build?
WITMORE: Vacuum tube, vintage guitar amplifiers. And I have played at Mr. Henry’s [Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE] at the jazz jam which was pretty intimidating [laughs], because they’re not messing around on that bandstand.
DEUTSCH: Maybe on the mountaintop in Colorado, there will be more music for you.
WITMORE: Absolutely there will be. Absolutely. I really look forward to that. It is a big passion of mine. When I graduated from high school, I was a senior superlative. It had nothing to do with Shakespeare, it was most musical.
DEUTSCH: Although there’s a lot of music in Shakespeare.
WITMORE: Oh, he wrote songs. Poems, songs, and plays. The Folger will always do those three artforms, I hope.
DEUTSCH: Okay. Thank you, Michael.
WITMORE: You’re absolutely welcome. Take whatever seems relevant.

END OF INTERVIEW

Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Interview with Michael Witmore   March 12, 2024

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